With Rory Kennedy‘s Ethel now airing on HBO, I’m re-running my reaction from last January’s Sundance Film Festival: “I was a little guarded about seeing Ethel, a doc about the director’s famous and revered mom, the widow of Robert F. Kennedy who became known as a force of nature beginning in the early ’60s. I was wondering what could be historically new in this, and whether it might feel a little too tidy and boilerplatey.

“The answers are ‘very little’ and ‘it sorta kinda is.’ But it’s a beautiful sonnet regardless — a funny, warm and deeply affectionate family tale that slips inside and, I swear, churns it all up again. Damned if it didn’t make me melt down a couple of times.

“It’s nominally focused, of course, on Ethel — her life with Bobby, the 11 kids (she was pregnant for 99 months all told), the White House and U.S. Senate years of the early to late ’60s, etc. But it’s primarily about Rory’s legendary rockstar dad.

“RFK’s political career and his marriage to Ethel are the spine of the doc, as they were so closely intertwined. But the doc more or less ends with his death in June 1968, and barely touches Ethel’s life for the last 40-plus years. The 80-something matriarch is honestly and bluntly presented as very private and guarded, and amusingly snippy at times. She ‘hates’ introspection, she says at one point. Anyone who’s ever had a feisty grandmother will chuckle at this.

“But it must be said that Rory Kennedy’s decision to only briefly summarize her mother’s life after 1968 and not explore any particulars (such as Ethel’s bout with alcoholism) makes this a lesser film than it could have been. It’s more than a bit of a gloss.

“And yet it’s such a charming and emotionally affecting one that almost all is forgiven. I couldn’t believe I was weeping at this, a significant portion of the the most familiar and widely told romantic tragedy of our times — the Kennedys who lived and soared and triumphed and made elective office sexy, and then were cut down. But I guess we all have our vulnerable spots.

Rory, Ethel Kennedy and grandkids somewhere in Park City with the last 24 hours.

Ethel director Rory Kennedy during post-screening q & a at the Park City Library — Saturday, 1.21, 10:40 am.

One of these days somebody is going to make a Michael Jackson documentary that isn’t filled with sycophants and grinning admirers coo-cooing about his electric dynamite white-sock coolitude. I like a lot of his music too but somebody needs to do a real portrait of the guy some day, a doc that says “look at this freak and how super-popular he was and still is, and how nobody wants to really look at the twisted truth.” Today it’s still “my God, he was such an amazing genius and now he’s gone.”

I wrote a nice friendly letter this morning to David Mamet, director-writer of a Phil Spector movie that completed filming in the summer of 2011 but has been MIA ever since. I wanted to know when it’ll be seen, but the email address I used is no longer valid. I called HBO to ask when Mamet’s Untitled Phil Spector Biopic (as it’s called on the IMDB) will air, and they just said “2013” with no hint about what month or season. So I’m writing a public letter to Mamet as follows:

(l.) Al Pacino as Phil Spector in David Mamet’s HBO biopic; (r.) Real McCoy during first Lane Clarkson murder trial .

“David — So what’s up with your Phil Spector movie with Al Pacino and Helen Mirren? You finished shooting it…what, 18 months ago and it occured to me this morning that no one’s heard diddly squat about it since then, and I think most people expected it would be on HBO sometime in 2012. HBO movies don’t hang around in limbo for months on end — they shoot, they go into post, and they air a few months later. They never, ever take a year and half to appear (presuming your film will debut sometime early next year) after principal photography.

An HBO spokesperson just told me it’s due to air ‘in 2013’ with no indication of when. What is it, some legal issue? Something to do with Lana Clarkson?

“You’re impossible to reach so I thought I’d try the ‘open letter’ approach. We spoke once at Sundance years ago. It might have been for The Spanish Prisoner. I’m a radical liberal but I don’t hate you for becoming a conservative. I actually like righties on a personal level. They seem straighter and more plain-spoken about things than liberals. I actually admire them when it comes to personal loyalty and doing favors and “speaking from the heart.”

“Could we do a phoner in which we’d discuss the film and your work on it, the genesis of the project and how it’s all been going? Two, when in 2013 do you expect it might be seen — spring, summer, late summer? Three, what’s been the hold-up? And four, why haven’t you and yours ever acknowledged that Vikram Jayanti‘s documentary about Spector, The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector, which opened at the Film Forum in June 2010, at least partly inspired the making of your film?

I’m into Spector more than most people in my realm. Jayanti’s doc is what got me there. wrote the following article, titled “Dark Star,” on 6.26.10:

I’ve known Phil Spector’s musical signature all my life — that “wall of sound” thing that gave such ecstatic echo-phonic oomph to all those early to mid ’60s hits (“Be My Baby”, “Walkin In The Rain“, “River Deep, Mountain High”) and Beatle songs he produced a few years later. But I’d never heard Spector speak or gotten to “know” him until I saw Vikram Jayanti’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, which will play the Film Forum from 6.30 to 7.13.

And he’s a fascinating man — there’s no getting around that. A brilliant, oddball X-factor “character” of the first order. I’ve known a few guys like Spector. They’re egotists and half-crazy and it’s always about them, but they’re a trip to talk to and share stories with. If you love show business, you can’t help but love how these guys are always sharp as a tack and don’t miss a trick and are always blah-blahing about their genius and their importance. Except Spector’s blah is backed up by truth. He’s a serious maestro who really did shape and inspire rock ‘n’ roll in its infancy, and who touched heaven a few times in the process.

Okay, so he probably shot Lana Clarkson, a 40 year-old, financially struggling actress, on 2.3.03 when she was visiting his home. Or maybe he threatened to shoot her and the gun accidentally went off. Or whatever. And maybe Spector telling a Daily Telegraph reporter two months before the shooting that “he had bipolar disorder and that he considered himself ‘relatively insane'” was a factor. And maybe he deserves to be in jail for 19 years. The guy is obviously immodest and intemperate with demons galore.

But you can tell from listening to Spector that he’s some kind of bent genius — that he’s brilliant, exceptional, perceptive — and that it’s a monumental tragedy that these qualities co-exist alongside so much weirdness inside the man — all kinds of strutting-egoist behavior and his having threatened women with guns and all of that “leave me alone because I’m very special” hiding-behind-bodyguards crap. Because life is short and the kind of vision and talent that Spector has (or at least had) is incredibly rare and world-class.

That’s why Jayanti’s film is so absorbing, and why the title is exactly right. Why do so many gifted people always seem to be susceptible to baser impulses? Why do they allow bizarre psychological currents to influence their lives? What kind of a malignant asshole waves guns around in the first place? I’ll tell you what kind of guy does that. A guy who never got over hurtful traumatic stuff that happened in his childhood (like his father committing suicide), and who decided early on that he wouldn’t deal with it.

It’s another tragedy that this BBC doc, originally aired in England in 2008, is viewable on YouTube. Perhaps this will affect ticket sales at the Film Forum, or maybe it’s generally understood that you can’t absorb a doc about a music legend unless you see it as a unified big-screen thing with decent sound pumping out of the speakers.

It mainly just needs to be seen, period. Spector’s story encompasses so much and connects to so many musical echos and currents that people (okay, older people) carry around inside, and the way this history keeps colliding with what Spector probably did (despite his earnest claims to Jayanti that he’s innocent) and the Court TV footage and the evidence against him and the thought of a woman’s life being snuffed out…it’s just shattering.

Phil Spector and the Ronettes during a 1963 Gold Star recording session in Los Angeles.

I’m adding Jayanti’s film to my list of the year’s best docs. I’ve seen it twice now and I could probably see it another couple of times. Anyone who cares about ’60s pop music and understands Spector’s importance in the scheme of that decade needs to see this thing. It’s a touchstone trip and an extreme lesson about how good and evil things can exist in people at the same time.

90% of the doc alternates between interviews with the hermetic Spector, taped between his first and second murder trials, and the Court TV footage. But the arguments and testimony are often pushed aside on the soundtrack by the hits that Spector produced with the Ronettes, the Righteous Brothers, Ike and Tina Turner, the Crystals, Darlene Love, John Lennon, George Harrison, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans (that rendition they and Spector recorded of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” in ’63). It’s the constant back and forth of beauty and darkness, beauty and rage, beauty and warped emotion — repeated over and over and over.

I never knew that the title of Spector’s “To Know Him Is To Love Him” (which he wrote and performed with the Teddy Bears in ’58) was taken from his father’s gravestone. I’d forgottten that he wrote “Spanish Harlem” — an exceptionally soulful ballad for the 1960 pop market. I never gave much thought to what “Da Doo Ron Ron” meant — I never thought it meant anything in particular — but Spector says it’s a metaphor for slurpy kisses and handjobs and fingerings at the end of a teenage date. Spector also had a good deal to do, he says, with the writing of Lennon’s “Woman Is Nigger of the World.”

There are two curious wrongos. Spector mentions that his father committed suicide when he was “five or six” — he was actually nine when that happened. (How could he not be clear on that?) Spector mentions that line about John Lennon having thanked him for “keeping rock ‘n’ roll alive for the two years when Elvis went into the Army” when in fact Spector’s big period began just after Elvis got out of the Army, starting around ’60 or thereabouts.

Spector mentions that if people like you they don’t say bad things about you, but it’s clear that if he hadn’t been such a hermit and hadn’t acted like a dick for so many years, and if he hadn’t been photographed with that ridiculous finger-in-the-wall-socket electric hairdo, and if he’d just gotten out and charmed people the way he does in the interview footage with Jayanti then…well, who knows? Maybe things might have turned out differently.

I was watching an MSNBC panel of undecided voters respond to the second debate a few days ago, and at one point Chris Matthews asked the four women on the panel (three of whom were leaning toward Romney, they said) if they had any reaction to Romney not being in favor of equal pay for equal work, and they all basically said “what of it?” — they were giving him a pass because they believed he was the conqueror and they wanted to kneel before him. They didn’t want to know any details.

In a 10.19 London Times piece, Kevin Maher has written that “come February 24 next year, there’s a very real possibility that Elle Fanning…will be among the nominees for Best Actress, thanks to her role in the drama Ginger & Rosa — a win would make her the youngest recipient of the award.”

Ginger & Rosa star Elle Fanning.

I don’t think so. Fanning is sufficient but not great in Ginger & Rosa, and, as I said in a brief Telluride Film Festival review, the film is only so-so. Will Fanning be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar within the next five or six or seven years? Probably. She’s got it, all right. It’s just a matter of her lucking into the right role, the right film and the right director at the right moment.

It wasn’t Ginger & Rosa that convinced me of this, but a brief moment in JJ Abrams‘ Super 8. Here’s how I put it on 5.27.11:

“There’s a moment when Fanning, who was good but mostly passive and nonverbal in Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere, begins performing some dialogue for a zombie movie that her friends (one of whom is played by newcomer Joel Courtney, who’s also quite good) are shooting. And something just clicks when she lets go with that special vibe or deep-well charisma or whatever it is that some actors just have. The instant she begins saying the lines…pocket drop. A feeling of being anchored and practiced and on a certain level older than her years, and the camera knowing this. I said to myself, ‘Wow, she’s getting there fast.'”

Note to Maher: Should Fanning receive a Best Actress nomination for Ginger & Rosa, it would first be known on January 10th, 2013.

Two days ago Business Insider‘s Joe Weisenthal posted a series of charts related to consumers and households, and showing we’re in a full-on economic comeback — not a boom phase, but a definite upswing. New housing starts shooting up. Retail sales re-accelerating. Unemployment below 8% and collapsing. New car sales up. Evolving consumer credit back to growth. Consumer discretionary stocks surging.

And Romney voters (i.e., those not simply motivated by wanting the black guy out of the White House) are saying, “Things are bad…we need to revert to the Bush-era policies that got us into trouble in the first place.”

“Long is the way, and hard, that out of darkness leads up to light.” — John Milton.

Tom Hanks dropping an f-bomb is nothing. What struck me is how much he sounds like film journalist James Rocchi starting at the 48 second mark. Hanks adopts a kind of sardonic, mock-narrator tone as he says “and the next time on the show there will be a seven-second delay.” Hanks is older than Rocchi and ditto the patter, but my first reaction was “wait, I know that tone of voice!”